


where spirits dwell

by holless



Series: row away, row away [2]
Category: Ib (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Gen, One Shot, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 00:04:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18354473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holless/pseuds/holless
Summary: In which Mary's just a little bit nervous, Garry has given up on sleep as a concept, and Ib is actually surprisingly alright with the odd situation they've found themselves in.





	where spirits dwell

Ib was fairly certain that she was happier with her current situation than either of her two companions.

She was a smart girl. Both in a technical sense, as she was good enough in school to have skipped over third grade entirely, but also in the sense of her having always been shockingly mature for her age. Her dad often joked that she'd have wrinkles before she was fifteen.

She had bet everything on her crying scheme working in the toybox. Bet everything on the affection Mary had shown her thus far - it was obvious she wanted to dispose of Garry, so Ib wasn't exactly feeling warm and fuzzy toward her, but in spite of Mary's unreal nature, she'd shown nothing but compassion and affection toward her. Even when she pulled a knife on Garry and took to stalking them through her sketchbook, Ib couldn't get the image out of her mind of Mary asking about snow, asking about Ib's parents, looking so horrified and genuinely distressed when Ib told her she'd sacrifice herself if things came down for it. Even when Mary held out her hand expectantly for Garry's rose, Ib noticed the careful way she handled her wilted rose in her other hand.

She couldn't bring herself to see a girl her age as a villain. She was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. That was the bet she made, and she _won._

Regardless. Ib seemed to be the only one of the trio that was even the slightest bit comfortable in the scenario they found themselves faced with. That wasn't to say she was _enjoying_ herself - hands still reached from walls to grab at her rose, ominous sculptures still loomed alongside corridors and made her jump when they blinked - but she was certainly better off than the other two.

Ib had finally quieted her sobs once she felt both Mary and Garry alongside her, two pairs of hands trying confusedly to comfort her. (Admittedly, starting to cry hadn't exactly been challenging, and it was a lot more difficult to stop than she would've preferred. It may not have entirely been a ruse.) She had risen from where she lay collapsed on the ground, gingerly lifting Garry's rose as she did so. Mary's breath caught, but she didn't say a word. She looked like she was about to cry. That could be dealt with later, though, because she swore the mannequins and bunnies that surrounded them were starting to look antsy. Without a word, Ib led them up and out of the toybox, then out through the pink house. As soon as the three of them arrived in a new area, a black staircase just outside of the disorienting sketchbook reality, Ib had broken the silence with the declaration that Mary would explain herself to them. If Garry's raised eyebrow was anything to go off of, he noticed that her voice was far too steady to have cried totally authentic tears beforehand, but Mary seemed none the wiser.

And so she explained.

She grew increasingly upset while talking until she eventually burst into tears. Ib patted her head gently, unknowingly reversing their previous roles, while Garry leaned awkwardly against the wall at her side.

Ib didn't think she was necessarily ready to forgive Mary. Her own tears had been a last ditch effort to prolong their chance of escape, but her sheer terror at the trade of roses was real. Mary had been more than ready to kill Garry and Ib knew it.

But then again... If faced with the opportunity, Ib was sure Garry would do the same to Mary.

And if she was in her position, a painting locked forever away from reality... Ib wondered if she'd go to the same desperate lengths.

So it was with certainty that the nine-year-old decided far before anyone else that _none_ of them belonged in the Fabricated World. Mary might be a painting, which, truth be told she couldn't really wrap her mind around, but she was _real._ She talked like a real girl. She teased and walked and looked like one, too, even if her face was just a bit too symmetrical. She was a painting but she was a _person,_ and she had thoughts and feelings and a soul.

As Mary explained her predicament, her inability to leave the gallery alone, Ib knew with increasing conviction that they would just have to get out together then. All three of them. Real or not. (Since the moment in the toybox when her mind stewed up the half-formed plan to follow her dad's advice and _just cry, act your age for once,_ that had become the only option.)

Thankfully, Garry and Ib quickly discovered that in the Fabricated World, they didn't grow hungry or thirsty.

So. For lack of a better word, Ib was content. She was starting to really miss her mom and dad, and on the day she first went to the gallery, school was supposed to start in four days, yet it had already been three since they decided to linger in the gallery. But Garry was nice and smelled like lemon and smoke and his coat was always warm, while Mary was chatty and Ib had taken to playing with her curls. When she pulled down on a strand of her bright blonde hair, it sprung up high enough to hit Mary in the nose, inevitably sending both of them into fits of giggles. Ib had never been so upset that her own hair was straight as could be.

Still, after three days passed, Ib couldn't exactly ignore the issue anymore: Mary and Garry were not as okay as she was. She understood it, she really did - Mary had been their enemy for a little while, there. She was moments from killing Garry, and maybe even Ib if it came down to it. And it didn't take a lot to figure out when Garry was scared because his hands shook or he clenched his fists or he bit his lip and sometimes he screamed a little, and when Ib's rose was in Mary's hands, Garry was silently _terrified._ When Ib tried to comprehend Mary's perspective, she had quickly come to the realization that she might have even done the same thing if put in a similar position. Garry had no such revelation. He was still scared of her, and she was possibly even more scared of him.

They didn't make eye contact, but somehow always managed to keep a wary eye on the other. After that first black staircase, the three of them found another leading down from a room bearing an uncanny resemblance to the lobby of Guertena's art exhibition, and Mary guided them through the following corridors disabling anything that tried to hurt them with ease until they were in a small, empty room where they could comfortably rest. Instead of resting, Mary and Garry sat on opposite sides of the area in tense silence while Ib slept. She woke up hours later to find them still doing so, possibly both absentmindedly wanting to defend Ib from the other.

Things continued in such a manner for far longer than Ib anticipated they would. Mary traipsed through the everchanging corridors with comfort that could only come from being in one's own home while Ib and Garry trailed nervously behind. She introduced them to friendly paintings and showed them rooms with dozens of bookshelves where the three of them could peruse a seemingly unlimited amount of information regarding the Fabricated World, and how all three of them could leave without any sort of sacrifice. (Neither Ib or Mary knew a lot of words, though, so Garry read books while Ib and Mary looked at pictures.) 

For the most part, the books were all pretty similar. Most were about Weiss Guertena - biographies, art collections, analyses. The ones about the Fabricated World were harder to come across, but were still commonplace. Garry mostly read those books, building stacks of all the ones that could prove useful.

When he found potentially relevant information, or things that confirmed Mary's explanation, he relayed it to them.

The books seemed to claim that, while finite, the Fabricated World constantly shifted and changed like a labyrinth. Upon his presumed death, it took on the life of Guertena for itself until it too was more a living creature than a place. (At this, Ib scooted uneasily away from the wall she'd been leaning against.) Even to a point where it seemingly wrote its own artworks into existence.

Like all living things, the gallery needed a source of energy. It needed to eat. From what they could derive from vague relevant passages, the gallery required some amount of spirits to nourish it. It would never allow Mary to leave if there was nothing to take her place - without some sort of sentient consciousness within, it would starve. Ib wondered if it had decided that Mary and the other beings of the gallery weren't enough to satiate it, hence it's ensnaring of Garry and herself.

The long and short of it was, without some sort of soul left behind in the gallery, it wouldn't release the others. The discovery sent a chill down her spine.

There were clocks in the Fabricated World, but their hollow ticks were irregularly spaced out or generally distorted, and as such it was only by their best guess that those 36 hours had passed in such a way. Reading. Sleeping. A few brief tours. Three days was a long time to go without sleep, Ib realized. Apparently, despite being a painting, Mary needed to sleep as well. She held off for a long time, but was no older than Ib and couldn't maintain it. The second night, She made Ib promise to watch over her while she slept. Once again, Ib knew for sure that Garry wouldn't try to hurt Mary in her sleep - he might be wary of her, but he would never do something so underhanded and cruel, especially not since they'd actually talked to each other and agreed to find a way to leave together. But she promised anyway, so Mary curled up at her side and planted her mop of bouncy curls on Ib's lap.

Garry returned a few minutes after Mary went to sleep. He had left to return a book that had proven useless to the shelf he found it on and returned with three more. He stopped when he entered the room, just before tripping over the girls that had unintentionally placed themselves right next to the door. Whoops.

He carefully stepped around them and sat himself down on the wall across from Ib, smiling pleasantly at her. Looking in his eyes then, she noticed that he hadn't been sleeping either. She didn't know adults needed to sleep the same way kids do.

"Are you going to bed, Ib?" He inquired, voice soft to avoid waking the girl asleep on her lap. She shook her head resolutely and he furrowed his brow. "Are you sure? You need to get some sleep, Ib, it's been a long day." (It really hadn't been, they didn't do anything besides read.)

"I have to watch over Mary," she stage-whispered back with another determined shake of her head. He blinked, then gave another sincere smile, some indeterminable emotion in his eyes.

"I see."

He opened a book on his lap. A few comfortably quiet minutes later, she got his attention by staring intently at him until he noticed, (he jumped a bit when he did) and she began to talk with him, lazily twirling a strand of blonde hair around her finger.

During their first, most eventful day together, Ib and Garry's conversations were almost exclusively about the gallery. It was understandably at the forefront of both their minds. But after the fact, while it was still shrouded in mystery, their current reality had become - in some surreal way - normal enough that they didn't feel a need to address it quite as often. So she instead asked about where he lived.

He told her he lived by the train tracks on West State and she pretended she knew where that was with a solemn nod. He also told her that he had a cat, and she nodded much more enthusiastically. She was big and orange, and her name was apparently just Cat. (Ib thought that was some pretty pathetic naming for someone who got on an artist for possibly naming something "Untitled.") She told him she had pet stuffed bunnies, and he asked her to tell them all of their names. The opened book rested long forgotten on his lap.

At one point, Garry yawned. She yawned back. He yawned again, so she fake-yawned to try to make him do it a third time, but he noticed and scoffed at her with a playful glare.

Ib didn't remember falling asleep. Garry had been talking, and at some point, the words just stopped registering in her head. But when she woke up, Mary was still sound asleep with her head in her lap, and pins and needles were prickling all down Ib's lower half.

She looked up. Garry was staring with bleary, half-lidded eyes at the stained and worn pages of his book, but clearly wasn't reading anything.

"Garry...?"

His head jerked up, eyes suddenly wide. She mentally cursed herself for getting his attention right when he may have been about to fall asleep.

 

It was late on that third day. Mary had taken to holding Ib's hand while she showed them around the nearby areas of the gallery, and sometimes they swang their clasped hands back and forth like Ib used to with her parents. It had been so short a time, but something about Mary made Ib wonder if this is what it felt like to have a sister.

Today, Mary had taken them out of the indigo area where they had slept for the past few nights, and led them down a trapdoor that unlocked when they removed the candle third from the left from a chandelier, as apparently indicated by a mural Mary mentioned was in an offshoot room. Said room was apparently only accessible by entering a color based code on the door. (The directions for that were in another area.)

To think Ib and Garry had even begun to see the whole gallery.

Mary then led them across a pinkish bridge, with what was a seemingly endless void beneath and around it. Ib took only a moment to look down into it and was overcome instantly by dizziness. Above them, however, swirled a sea of yellow sparks that flickered and flew about, seemingly infinite in their numbers. Above the door at the end of the bridge hung an emptied frame with a nameplate that simply read "Fireflies." Mary was ceaselessly chattering, talking about the room and the painting and other paintings and seemingly whatever came to mind.

The door opened into a huge lavender room. A spiral staircase led up in the far left corner, and a circular patch of tiles that doubtlessly responded to some code sat in the center, blocked off by a red rope that Mary usually disregarded anyway. It was far more reminiscent of a ballroom than the gallery hallways they'd come to expect.

Ib was... actually looking forward to seeing the works of art this area had to display. After all, it had been her own interest in it that brought her and her parents to the exhibition in the first place. With Mary at their side, they had yet to lose any petals to malicious artworks, but vases were plentiful regardless. There was something almost intriguing about the Fabricated World in times like this. When she felt safe with the people beside her. When it wasn't cruel or strange, but instead curious and pretty with walls that matched Garry's hair.

Upon coming to that momentous revelation, Ib whirled around to relay the color correlation epiphany to Garry. Just in time to watch him abruptly stumble and collapse to the ground with a _thump._

Mary went dead silent. For a moment, neither girl did anything but stare in shocked terror at his motionless form on the ground.

Then, with a shaky exclamation of his name, Ib dropped to her knees beside him, Mary opposite her. Her pale blue eyes were wide with alarm while she sat back on her heels, gaping at him in utter befuddlement. His hair was obscuring his face.

"His rose!"

Mary lifted his rose from where it had fallen from his hair and held it carefully while they both examined it, frantically searching for any sign of imperfections. There were none.

Tears sprung to Ib's eyes.

She was readying herself to attempt shaking him awake when he suddenly tilted his head up, and the wave of relief was so immense she thought she would drown in it.

He pushed himself up without a sound, hair falling back into its usual position. He turned to look at her, rubbing his eyes, his expression the picture of dazed confusion.

Apparently noticing the tears in Ib's eyes, he suddenly shot back to awareness, dropping his hand and immediately moving to sit properly. He looked her over with a combination of horror and concern that he honestly tended to show pretty often.

She subconsciously rubbed her own eyes, then realized she had begun sniffling too. No wonder he was so worried.

"W-Woah, Ib, what happened, are you alright?" he stammered. She threw her arms around his middle, but then quickly pulled away when she almost sent him tumbling back to where he was on the ground.

"You fell," Mary declared before Ib could form the words.

He stared at her for just a moment longer than necessary. Maybe he was noticing the way her eyes were similarly shiny with unshed tears.

Then he laughed, quietly and sheepishly, and after having been so scared the sound was the nicest thing Ib had ever heard.

"Oh- Sheesh, look at me scaring you two," he smiled apologetically. "I... I'm sorry I think I was just uh... tired," he explained, scratching the back of his neck.

Oh. Right.

He hadn't slept in three days.

Mary and Ib stared at him for a few seconds, watching him grow increasingly uncomfortable under their gazes. Then Mary giggled, and Ib joined her with a small smile.

Mary delicately tucked the blue rose back into his hair, then grabbed his wrist, and for once he didn't flinch at either motion.

She pulled him to his feet. Ib followed suit. He swayed a little once upright, and Ib immediately latched onto his arm to try and keep him from falling again. He laughed again, embarrassed.

"Just uh, just got a bit lightheaded there," he murmured breathlessly.

Ib didn't let go of his arm, even after he steadied himself. 

Mary and Ib led Garry back across the bridge, careful not to let him stumble again. He seemed somewhat humiliated to be unnecessarily guided by two girls only barely over half his height, but he didn't pull his arm from Ib's grasp.

They came back to their empty little room in the indigo area and Garry all but collapsed again. Ib situated herself beside him. Fortunately, he remained conscious long enough for Ib to flick him in the ear and tell him that if he didn't go to sleep she'd tell on him to his cat. Thankfully, he must've been too exhausted to recognize that her threat made literally no sense. He obeyed despite Mary's presence only a few feet away.

Once his breathing had slowed, Ib turned to her other side to whisper to Mary that they could explore the lavender area tomorrow, only to find that she too had fallen asleep.

She watched over her sleeping companions and felt an odd surge of protectiveness. Then she cautiously leaned over until she was propped up against Garry, and reached gently for Mary's hand. Then she closed her eyes.

She had a feeling the two of them could become a bit happier around each other as well.

**Author's Note:**

> ngl i finished writing this like three days after the first part went up, then i spent the next two weeks editing it
> 
> anyway, here are some thoughts on this part!
> 
> \- while i honestly can't bring myself to dislike anything about ib, it's true that garry as a character is just kinda. flawless. as in he doesn't have any real weaknesses - he's just a Super Cool Guy. and i love that, i think he's fantastic, but i also think it's a lot more interesting to have characters with genuine flaws like real people have! so i purposefully made him a bit slow to forgive and harsh on mary, because i feel like the one real fault of his that's canonically hinted toward is a lack of empathy toward her. i hope it didn't warp his character too bad
> 
> \- also, the scene when mary and ib are kneeling down beside garry after he faints intentionally mirrors the similar scene in the first part of this series! i just wanted to clarify that bc i don't want people to think that the only character interaction i know how to write is One Character On Floor, Two Other Characters Kneel at Their Side Concernedly
> 
> \- this kinda wraps up the set-up of this series idea! after this point, it's probably gonna be pretty non-chronological and generally more fun. however, i'm not entirely certain what the next fic will be - therefore, i'm asking you to suggest whatever you'd like to see happen in this verse! character interactions, conversations, plot ideas, whatever it may be, i'm absolutely open to any concepts you have. i would really really love to hear what people want from this story!
> 
> thanks 4 coming 2 my ted talk


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